Back in the day I used to spend a fair amount of time in various IRC channels. If you did too, you’ll feel a pang of nostalgia reading the great quotes at Bash.org.
<Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam
<bovril> it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls
I’ve always loved these quotes but also always forget to bookmark them - never again!
IronChef Foicite: well, there’s a lot of reasons
IronChef Foicite: i mean, roses only last like a couple weeks
IronChef Foicite: and that’s if you leave them in water
IronChef Foicite: and they really only exist to be pretty
IronChef Foicite: so that’s like saying
IronChef Foicite: “my love for you is transitory and based solely on your appearance”
IronChef Foicite: but a potato!
IronChef Foicite: potatos last for fucking ever, man
IronChef Foicite: in fact, not only will they not rot, they actually grow shit even if you just leave them in the sack
IronChef Foicite: that part alone makes it a good symbol
IronChef Foicite: but there’s more!
IronChef Foicite: there are so many ways to enjoy a potato! you can even make a battery with it!
IronChef Foicite: and that’s like saying “i have many ways in which I show my love for you”
IronChef Foicite: and potatos may be ugly, but they’re still awesome
IronChef Foicite: so that’s like saying “it doesn’t matter at all what you look like, I’ll still love you”
Top 100, 101-200
That’s photoshopping to you, Mr Layman.
Yesterday, Adobe released the long-awaited, online version of the coveted Photoshop; Photoshop Express. At first glance it looks impressive and offers many neat features.
Now before you go berserk, let us exercise some journalistic caution — it’s not everything you can do in Photoshop fit into a web browser. Not nearly.
No layers here, no fancy pants masking. But for 95% of your photos, it offers pretty much all you need to fix ‘em up, and it does it with style.
Whether adjusting exposure, white balance, or hue, touching up blemishes, or distorting your image, Photoshop Express provides an easy slider and thumbnails to give you an instant preview of your image at various settings. Even undo is better than you’d expect.
As one who occasionally needs to edit images while in work (on my lunch-break, natch), it looks like there will be some tough competition between Photoshop Express and my current favourite online editor, Picnik.
via Photojojo
Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the MySpace ’safeguards’ being put in place to protect minors. His very succinct closing comments are a must-read.
…there isn’t really any problem with child predators — just a tiny handful of highly publicized stories — on MySpace. It’s just security theatre against a movie-plot threat. But we humans have a well-established cognitive bias that overestimates threats against our children, so it all makes sense.
To the right is a thumbnail of a picture showing the allowed wanderings of the children in one family through recent generations. It’s a fascinating comparison.
Thanks for the image, Carl (originally from the Daily Mail)
Jan Pettit’s list of fears, ranked from childhood through parenthood. I’m currently somewhere between 13 and 17:
13. Fear of selling out
Deserting dreams.
Embracing capitalism.
14. Fear of the dark (continued)
Parking lots at night.
Deserted streets at night.
Apartments at night.
Houses at night.
Bedrooms at night.
15. Fear of rejection (continued)
By lovers.
By bosses.
By friends.
16. Fear of being unloved
17. Fear of being unlovable
By now everyone knows that Sir Arthur C Clarke recently passed away - a truly sad event. However, you may not have watched his ‘final message to earth‘.
Communication technologies are necessary, but not sufficient, for us humans to get along with each other. This is why we still have many disputes and conflicts in the world. Technology tools help us to gather and disseminate information, but we also need qualities like tolerance and compassion to achieve greater understanding between peoples and nations.
I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I hope we’ve learnt something from the most barbaric century in history – the 20th. I would like to see us overcome our tribal divisions and begin to think and act as if we were one family. That would be real globalisation…
He continued his communiqué with three final wishes, the second of which was:
I would like to see us kick our current addiction to oil, and adopt clean energy sources. For over a decade, I’ve been monitoring various new energy experiments, but they have yet to produce commercial scale results. Climate change has now added a new sense of urgency. Our civilisation depends on energy, but we can’t allow oil and coal to slowly bake our planet…
via Wired Science
